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Seeing and being seen are also obviously essential to individuals. They form a part of the psychopathologies addressed in psychoanalytic treatments, ranging from a need to be invisible to a need always to be seen. Pointing out the similarities between…
Reflecting on the moment, this wasn’t simply the first time I was more honest with a client; it was the first time I was more honest with myself. These thoughts had been brewing for some time, but I had never…
I grew up in the blue state of Rhode Island, where my father was active in local Democratic politics. I voted mostly for Democrats but registered as an Independent. While I never missed voting in a presidential election, I didn’t…
Inside and outside of sessions, I am a speaker of different languages. The slang of Bronx classrooms and Castle Hill housing projects spices my English, and a New York accent peppers my sentences. For clinicians unversed in the lexicon of…
Since going through the process on my farm using those psychoanalytical tools, I have seen all around me in this country opportunities for what we learned to be applied to psychoanalysis. There’s a special role for psychoanalysis in South Africa,…
Intensely negative perceptions of the student activists have emerged, reflecting a type of transference I have termed the negative social transference, directed toward marginalized groups (student activists) from the dominant social surround (campus administrators, monied interests, and government power). Working…
For me, growing up in a fundamentalist, religious dictatorship like Pakistan, I was taught to live in fear of and hate our Indian neighbors who might attack us at any time. I was taught to believe in the supremacy of…
While I have been impacted by my physical limitations, the bigger burden has always been my self-consciousness. No matter how much success I achieved, I could never shake the feeling that I was defective and that my defect eclipsed all…
I could not stop dwelling on that first question: Can it hold me? Will I fit? My Goldilocks search for an analytic training program, and more specifically for a training analyst, has been a long one, spanning three institutes and…
After my shock and rage subsided a bit, my first thought was that this act, the murder of an American president by members of the US government, has elements of a fascist coup about it. The men who planned the…
I don’t believe others have the right to diminish the traumas we have experienced, or we those of others. At the same time, we have to ask ourselves, it seems to me, whether any of us do humanity a service…
[…] Ayiti engaged our senses from the moment we woke up to the second we fell asleep in the home my mother and father adored as first-time home buyers. I could not comprehend as a child, nor as an adolescent,…
Disappeared memory and history erased remain fascism’s best weapon. In the world as it exists, the protofascist leader purports omnipotence, forcing helplessness and weakness into the minority group to be victimized. Which part of the split would any of us…
[…] It may be that my security comes not simply from a “good enough” mother, as Winnicott theorizes, but from “good enough” mothering—a multitude of mothers who created a collage of mothering and a patchwork of sufficient “reliable holding” for…
In the elementary school common room, boys congregated in one area, and girls congregated in another. I stood in the middle, grappling with a painful sense of disconnection. Folding in with either group was impossible. I was alone in noticing…
[…]At the clinic, I became part of a lively swirl of women who provided me with the guidance and intimacy I lacked at home. They were my family as my family became increasingly unavailable. Women ran the show. It was…
I sit across from the Washington elite. I work to access their thoughts and dreams as they evolve in the therapeutic relationship. It can look like a one-sided process, but it most certainly is not. When it goes well, my…
For some years I have been warning publicly that we are heading into a third global conflict, and this, at times, led me to feel quite down about the prospects for humanity. This third global conflict is not simply a rerun…
I am writing to share my personal narrative and reaction to recent events at APsaA and in the Middle East. I am Jewish, and I lived in Israel from the time I was five, when we immigrated to Israel from…
[…] I don’t think it’s melodramatic to say that the field of psychoanalysis remains guilty for its historically hideous treatment of LGBTQ+ and gender-nonconforming individuals—a history which this event is trying to reconcile with. It’s no secret that until frighteningly…
